Opinion: Canada's long history of racism

Our children are taught about the goodliness of the Underground Railroad, but never an honest history of our first public schools or black migration. That there are racist place names in Quebec is part of a long pattern.

Background actors are seen during filming of "The Book Of Negroes" in Cole Harbour, N.S., on Monday, April 28, 2014. One of the most devastating ways that Canada has denied its own history of anti-black racism is through a narrative of benevolence that overshadows the human agency of black struggle, Rachel Zellars writes. Darren Pittman / THE CANADIAN PRESS

As a PhD student and black American living and raising my children in Quebec, I have found myself over the last four years most interested in research involving the history of Quebec and Canada — particularly, comparative histories between the United States and Canada. I have come to think of my own research involving the history of anti-black public schooling practices throughout Canada in the first half of the 19th century as an archetype for understanding race and racism within this country, for explaining the patterns of Canadian anti-black racism that so many of my friends native to here struggle to shape into both word and emotion.

This historical period was, of course, the time when Egerton Ryerson was dreaming into existence Canada’s first public school systems. It was also the period that saw the first large migrations of black enslaved who unshackled their bodies and risked everything to journey north to Canada, only to be met with a virulent white Canadian racism that bore down upon the bodies of black children who were shoved into segregated and inferior schools.

The history of anti-black racism in Canada (and, un-uniquely, Quebec) has followed two general patterns.

First, like France, it simply buries its most shameful bits — instead, presenting public school students with historical texts of void and whiteness; feigning innocence and privacy rights when a fear of black ancestry in a family tree threatens one’s self-designation as pure laine; and in Quebec, uniquely, insisting that its historical “tradition” does not, could not, possibly support anti-black racism. In also brazenly labelling themselves the real nègres of this country, Quebecers have decidedly erased the histories of black Quebecers and in true form, further concealed the province’s brutal historical relationship with its black population.

Canada’s other anti-black trope can be seen in the narratives of anti-American historical distinction it has long claimed for itself. And yet, as Canadian legal scholars and historians have pointed out, Jim Crow practices infused every institution on this soil, in every province, well through the 1960s. The absence of black men visibly dangling from poplar trees did not mean that black men failed to feel the terror of violence when white Canadians threatened lynching as discipline. And white Canadians did indeed.

In the study of the 19th-century history of schooling, one can find the methods of harm that white Canadians have always committed against the black population.

These harms continue today through such hateful place names as “Nigger Rapids,” which this province seeks to justify by invoking, again, a perverted narrative of history.

It’s a narrative that our children are taught when they learn about the goodliness of the Underground Railroad, but never an honest history of our first public schools or black migration. And overlooked are the black people, with the agency of bone and flesh and feet, running north and desiring freedom across a border. One of the most devastating ways that Canada has denied its own history of anti-black racism is through a narrative of benevolence that overshadows the human agency of black struggle.

Similarly, when a provincial official speaks, reverently, about a river called “Nigger Rapids” that was named, as he insists, to “honour” dead black people, but ignores the sheer violence of the word, Quebec is simply doing what it has always done to black people in the province.

And so it is again, Quebec’s exemplary historical perversion, with the announcement last week that Quebec was “considering” changing 11 geographic sites in the province that currently bear the word “nigger” as part of their description. Although some insist upon the benign etymology of the word “nègre,” Quebec’s history tells a different story. The Niger River, near Sherbrooke, a location with a historic concentration of black people, was officially spelled “Nigger River” until 2006. A number of local historians and intellectuals, including Pierre Vallières himself, concur that the best-known invocation of “nègre” in Quebec was, indeed, intended as “nigger.”

Given Quebec’s history of anti-black racism and slavery, it is clear that the sites containing the word “nègre” were intended as denigration. As one historian has noted, the use of “nigger” and its frequency communicates what was socially acceptable at the time and made acceptable as official policy when the natural symbols — Quebec’s lakes, rivers and rapids — were finally given provincial names. The current resistance, both socially and administratively, to shed the word “nigger/nègre” from the official Quebec Toponymy Commission roster, is repulsive, but well within the tradition and history of both Quebec and Canada.

As Montreal’s streets and bridges and parks all have names, so do the black couple who tragically drowned in the “Nigger Rapids” that currently dishonours their memory, though their names are not part of the historical record.

Recently, the United States has been reckoning with its own iconic symbol of white supremacy, the Confederate flag. A few weeks ago, when a young student and activist, Bree Newsome, climbed the state capitol flagpole in South Carolina after the Emanuel AME church massacre to rip down the Confederate flag, she was not climbing the pole with the hope of eradicating white supremacy or erasing the history of the Civil War. She was climbing the pole because she loves black people. She was climbing the pole because she hates black suffering and knows how symbols can unnecessarily, persistently enact violence upon the bodies of black people who are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of sharecroppers and slaves.

I think of the word “nigger” similarly. It is the most hateful symbol, unequivocally, that has been used to defile black people in North America since the 19th century. It is time to retire it for good from official provincial use. It is also absolutely time to insist on greater infrastructure (textbooks, secondary courses, university programs and degrees, etc.) that focus on black Quebec history and culture.

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